Science, Music, and Society Podcast
Science, Music, and Society Podcast
Episode 2. Science, Bach, and Square Dance (Part 2 of 2)
In this episode, we will explore how a power science couple, both classical music lovers from the east coast, became country music singing square dancers.
In Part 2 of the interview, Professors Karin Rabe and Greg Moore discuss their love for square dancing, the math behind square-dancing, and the songs they did not mind listening to forever on Spotify. Don't miss their illustrations of square dance calls and videos of them calling over zoom and in person at a recent national square-dance convention.
00:04: Where do you get inspiration from when it comes to writing square dance scripts?
03:15 What are some of your favorite square dance calls?
04:17 What are some of the mathematics behind square dancing?
07:08 Do you think that, when you square dance, your mood shifts? Does this art form cause you to respond in ways that other forms of music or physical activities don't?
09:15 What's the meaning of music to you?
10:46 What 5 songs would you put on the Spotify playlist?
14:21. What advice do you give to female students who want to pursue science?
16:25 Karin and Greg demonstrated a sequence of square dance calls
18:54 Karin and Greg calling at the recent National Square Dance Convention
21:55. Karin and Greg calling at a zoom square dance gathering
ABOUT SCIENCE, MUSIC, AND SOCIETY PODCAST
A show that explores the intersection of science and music and their benefits to society through personal stories of scientists and musicians.
You can watch the entire video podcast on YouTube at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc83Bpg8hEEHuEXWk7qIJm2SbUMbww74j or listen to the audio podcast at https://ScienceMusicAndSocietyPodcast.buzzsprout.com
ABOUT SOPHIA SI
A high school senior in Houston, TX, who grew up playing the piano and loving science.
ABOUT KARIN RABE
A Board of Governors Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ (http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~karin/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karin_M._Rabe) and member of the National Academy of Sciences.
ABOUT GREG MOORE
A Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ (http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~gmoore/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Moore_(physicist)) and member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Sophia Si:
Yeah. Um, and so my next question is when you're writing your scripts for square dancing, how do you get inspiration for that? How do you, think of, or connect whichever moves you wanna connect with each other?
Greg Moore :
Well, that's an excellent question. So, first of all, I should say that not everybody, writes scripts and then reads them, many people do it extemporaneously, that's harder. That's a lot harder to do well, but, especially since you have to, you're mixing all these people up and now you have to get them together with their original partner. It's a very difficult, jigsaw puzzle that you're trying to solve quickly. And with making decisions on a fraction of a second time scale, but there are certain sequences of moves that flow well together.
where you know, that the body is that the dancer's bodies are turning in certain directions. So you don't want to have them turning and then suddenly turn the other way. That's bad calling. That's one thing. So there are these nice sequences that you, that you just learn by doing or dancing.
Karin Rabe :
Yeah. And so I have two things to contribute to that, you know, how do we come up with ideas? One of them is that, we actually dance to excellent callers when we go to festival or we, when we go to dances and, people are calling here. And if we, you know, if there is something that we're like, wow, that's so cool. Like, that was great. We actually will. We'll write it down so we can learn it and use it in our own writing. And then another way that, we generate some kind of interesting material is we might pick a particular call and then try to work out interesting flow sequences as Greg has described that involve that call, like building blocks that we can use. And we'll dance them here in the living room to see, you know, to see how they feel. And, you know, do they flow nicely and are they satisfying?
Greg Moore:
And another important tool in the toolbox is that there are computer programs that, show dancers, you can type in the calls, or even some in, with some of those computer programs, you can even speak the calls and with voice recognition, the dancers on the screen will dance the calls. And so you can kind of compose a dance that way using a computer,
Sophia Si :
Oh, wow.
Greg Moore:
Uh, before computers, people had what were called checkers, they would, we have cutouts of dancers and we still use those. So you have checkers, cutouts of dancers, and you sort of push them around on the table.
Sophia Si :
Mm okay. Sort of like chess a little,
Karin Rabe :
Yeah.
Greg Moore:
A little like chess. Yeah.
Sophia Si :
What's your favorite call?
Greg Moore :
So a call is, is a sequence of dance moves. I dunno, Karen, what's your
Karin Rabe :
I have a crazy affection for Chain Down the Line. Okay. So it's just so you know, uh, I just like, it. How about you?
Greg Moore :
I like something called Relay the Deucey,
Karin Rabe:
that's one, the long calls
Greg Moore :
One of the long calls, Flutter Wheel and Reverse Flutter Wheel. Extremely nice. Yeah.
Karin Rabe:
Just sounds good.
Sophia Si :
I like how each one of them,
Greg Moore:
We could actually illustrate those for you with those computer programs, if you're curious to see what they look
Sophia Si :
Oh, yeah.
Greg Moore:
Do you think we could do that? Karen? Can you bring up Callarama?
Karin Rabe:
I don't have Callarama on this computer
Greg Moore :
Oh, what a shame. Okay.
Sophia Si :
Well that's okay. You talked a little bit about this, but, briefly, could you just explain the mathematics behind square dancing? You can pull up the slides if you want to, if you wanna share your screen.
Greg Moore :
Well, I don't think we need to, because, the talk goes on and on about that,
Karin Rabe:
Once we get started with that, it'll just take over the whole podcast. So, the first kind of mathematical thing is that you can think of the arrangement of the dancers on the floor as a physical state of the square. And the calls are like operators that act on the square and change it from one state to another sort of like in quantum mechanics, you have, a time evolution operator that moves, you know, evolves the state and time. And here we're evolving the state of the square by acting on the square with these calls. Another physics aspect has to do with, symmetry, like certain symmetries in the square and the calls preserve the symmetries or break the symmetries or restore the symmetries. Since we, both, in our own fields, work a lot with symmetries that, every time we look at a square, we see the symmetries of the square.
Greg Moore :
And there're also interpretations in terms of not theory and, abstract mathematics, like category theory.
Karin Rabe :
Right. So, yeah.
Greg Moore :
You don't need to know any of that, by the way, to square dance.
Karin Rabe:
Right but would be a good thing to. But
Greg Moore :
I think virtually no squared dancers think in terms in those terms when they're dancing, but, you can interpret it.
Karin Rabe:
Right. But in one, one version of the talk, we impress the, the mathematicians of the Park City Mathematics Institute by presenting, a theorem about square dancing as in the framework of category theory and making even a fake journal reference.
Sophia Si :
Oh, wow.
Karin Rabe:
But the theorem was true.
Sophia Si :
<affirmative>
Karin Rabe :
You know, it wasn't just like gobbledy cook that sounded like a theorem. It was actually true.
Sophia Si:
Okay. Wow. I was also thinking, since there are so many different combinations of, you know, moves that you can put together in one call, that's another form of mathematics behind square dancing. I also did notice when I was watching your video, when you were calling that, a lot of callers kind of took on a Southern twang or a Southern accent. Maybe it just reminded me a lot of that. Do you think that when you square dance, there's a shift in your mood, or maybe, it makes you feel a certain way, that other forms of music or other activities maybe don't
Greg Moore:
I don't, well, first of all, you don't need a Southern twang. So obviously we're, we don't have, we don't naturally speak with a Southern twang. Right. Although sometimes when I'm calling, I will kind of put on that kind of show, but I should comment, you know, that, square dancing is a very international, activity. And there's some really fantastic English square dancers, and they don't even attempt that they call with their English accents and it sounds great. Or
Karin Rabe:
They're, or they're German accents
Greg Moore:
Or their German accents. But, you know, I mean, we were just a few days ago dancing to Di Green and Terry McCann and from England again by zoom and, you know, they have English accents. That sounds great.
Karin Rabe :
But yeah, but I mean, in terms of mood though, one of the reasons that people enjoy square dancing is that it's just a really amazing mood it's lifter and energizer. Like there've been many times at the end of the week, on a Friday night when I've been feeling like, oh, I'm so tired. I don't really wanna go out dancing, and then we go, and then we're like, you know, after 15 minutes or so, we're, start to feel good and start to feel energy, you know, that's true. It's a great,
Greg Moore:
It's a great, you
Karin Rabe :
you leave your troubles behind and just enjoy the dancing.
Sophia Si :
Right. What is the meaning of music to you? Do you think, maybe in square dancing or just music in particular, what role does that play? What is the meaning of that to you?
Greg Moore :
I, it's hard to answer. I mean, music is such an important part of my life and always has been, you know, I always listen to music, always been involved with music in some way, so it's just, can't really put my finger on meaning it's just an essential part of who I am.
Karin Rabe :
Yeah. it's also just a, you know, really connect on an emotional level, like listening to certain pieces of music, certain classical pieces of music, or certain certain songs just, uh, wake something up inside of you. And you get that feeling of connect, you know, of that connection to the music and to the performers. And that's just for me, like a real, that's also kind of a very powerful positive feeling.
Sophia Si :
Yeah. I totally agree. When I play the piano too, I also feel the same thing. Like it definitely the type of a music that I play or the type of the music that I listen to definitely does play a really big role. So yeah, I totally agree. I also have a question if you could make a Spotify playlist and you could only put five songs on it, it might be different for, you know, the two of you, but, um, what would that look like?
Greg Moore:
Um, well, okay. I mean, I think that depends a lot on, the kind of mood you're in or you're trying to get yourself in and what the circumstances are, for example, when I go running, Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, especially the last movement is quite a great piece of music to run to. If I'm sick, the middle movement of Opus, 132 of Beethoven String Quartet, called the Heiliger Dankgesang, which he wrote while convalescing from an illness, is kind of perfect. You know, I even have playlists for these different situations. One is called quiet night and it has things like the Heiliger Dankgesang, and the Rachmaninoff Vocalise and so on. But, you know, if I had to choose, I would choose a lot of Bach. I would choose the Well-Tempered Clavier and, um, the suites, Goldberg Variations and Schubert Impromptus.
Karin Rabe:
Yeah, I enjoy listening to all different kinds of music, classical and the more square dancing calling we've been doing, the more I've been listening to different kinds of popular music and country music, both from, classic stuff from the fifties, like Buddy Holly, you know, all the way through disco and up to the current day. But if I had to pick five songs on a playlist, I think they would also, for me, they would also be classical like chamber music, string quartets, because, those other song, you know, other songs like Buddy Holly songs or Johnny Cash songs are great, but I could see myself listening to Bach or to Beethoven string quartet like every day forever. I have actually now, having tried to sing songs, I have a much much higher respect for Pop's musicians than I did before. I can now see all the incredible talent and artistry that's going into getting those songs and making them so catchy and cool and appealing that they just get like millions and millions of views on YouTube.
Greg Moore :
It really, again, one of those things that looks easy.
Karin Rabe:
Right but
Greg Moore:
But I have to say that square dance calling is for me. I mean, I never paid much, much attention to, popular music. I mean, of course I was aware of it and aware of many songs, but, it's been quite an education and, you know, I was listen, basically listening mostly to classical music most of my life until I started the square dance calling.
Sophia Si:
That's great. One last thing before I ask you to maybe perform a little something for us is I have one more question for Karen and that's. Do you have any advice for female students who wanna get into science? Any qualities that they should have, characteristics, what would you say?
Karin Rabe:
My advice is really for everybody, which is, but I think sometimes, women students, don't get as much encouragement, or they get some active discouragement or, if they're having difficulty, they might feel that this is not really for them and not, and that they shouldn't stick with it. So I think, my advice is, you know, if you enjoy physics, if you love doing it, you know, get immersed in it, then you should, you know, don't let people outside discourage you, you should look for good mentors and good fellow students and ignore the naysayers, keep at it. if you believe that's right for you. For example, for me, I started study physics at Princeton and Greg has always been a great supporter for me. And sometimes even when things weren't going so well, you know, he was always encouraging me and helping me my spirits up and keep at it. So that's, you know, if you can find people like that to help you, you know, or teachers mentors.
Sophia Si :
Yeah. That's great. Thank you for that. So I guess, is there maybe a call that you would like to perform for us now?
Karin Rabe:
So what we got ready for you. So again, you can pick and choose as you like. So we set up to call like, basically, you know, maybe this would be like a minute and a half we'll each call one sequence for you, the way we would call if we were calling on zoom. And then I'll also share with you a video of us calling at the national square dance convention, where you can see us, you know, up on the stage, and the people dancing while we're calling.
Sophia Si :
Okay, sure. That sounds great.
Karin Rabe :
Yeah, cuz it's more fun to see the people dancing
Greg Moore :
Bow to your partner Bow to your corner too Hey, walk around that corner girl, left hand ready for a DO Paso, partner by the left, a corner by the right , a partner by the left, four ladies, chain across, join 16 hands, circle left, circle to the left with the one that's fouth (?), ladies in the men Sashay Let me hear about it. Ladies in the men Sashe, circled to the left the same old way. Allemande left with the old left hand, let's go with the right left grand. Can't go home with old man Bill, bridge washed out at the bottom of the hill.
Karin Rabe :
When you're home, passed the ocean there, extend, and swing through two by two, boys run right, couples circulate, chain down the line. You turn yours and I'll turn mine lines forward up and back you go, then pass through, bend the line, star through , there's your corner, Allemande left, and a right left grand round the ring it goes, meet at home and bow to the partner corner to you cause you're through.
Greg Moore:
Okay. That's a little sampling and of what we sound like.
Karin Rabe:
Right. And then, uh, I picked a video that we took at the convention here is Good Luck Charm short version. You can see us on the right hand side, right? Yeah. Okay.
Karin and Greg calling in convention video to the music of "Good Luck Charm"
Karin Rabe :
That was, you saw people dressed up and
Sophia Si :
Yes
Karin Rabe :
They were having a good time.
Greg Moore
They seemed to be having a good time.
Sophia Si :
That was very fun. That was great <laugh>
Karin Rabe :
<laugh> And we were having a good time too.
Sophia Si :
Yes, I can tell. Well thank you so much for
Greg Moore:
Thank you
Sophia Si:
For being on here and for sharing that with us, that was amazing. And it looked, it looked so fun. I wanna square dance.
Karin and Greg:
It is so fun. It is. Give it a try.
Video of Karin and Greg doing a call to Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” on a zoom square dance gathering
